There is a tendency in today’s U.S. discussion to attempt to “white” wash (pun intended) history by denying the truth of our past. For example, the true stories of the Native Americans (as now revealed in Manning’s “1491″), the African slaves (as revealed in Huxley’s “Roots” and Blackmon’s “Slavery By Another Name” about post Civil War Slavery), the Asians (as revealed in Takata’s “Strangers From A Different Shore”) and European types many of whom (especially the wealthy) were undeniably the oppressors of the poor and disenfranchised. It is this oppressor group and its populace that, today, seeks to rewrite history leaving out the atrocities and the evil deeds done in the process of its search for wealth, power and dominance over the world. E.J. Dionne Jr, of the Washington Post, shines a light on this lie as it pertains to how the issues leading to the Civil War have historically been depicted and how this depiction blurs our understanding of today’s politics.

Don’t Spin The Civil War
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Sunday, December 26, 2010; 8:00 PM

The Civil War is about to loom very large in the popular memory. We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of contemporary politics or long-standing myths to cloud our understanding of why the nation fell apart.

The coming year will mark the 150th anniversary of the onset of the conflict, which is usually dated to April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on federal troops occupying Fort Sumter. Union forces surrendered the next day, after 34 hours of shelling.

The Civil War has forever captured the American imagination (witness the popularity of reenactments) for the gallantry and heroism of those who fought and died, but also for the sheer carnage and destruction it left in its wake. Anniversaries heighten that engagement, and I still recall the centennial of the war in 1961 as a time when kids with no previous interest in American history were exchanging Civil War trading cards along with baseball cards.

My neighborhood friend Jon Udis got a subscription to Civil War Times Illustrated, and our regular discussions of sports heroes Bill Russell, Johnny Unitas and Carl Yastrzemski were briefly interrupted by talk about Grant and Lee, Sherman and “Stonewall” Jackson.

But our conversations, like so many about the war, focused on people and battles, not on why the confrontation happened in the first place. There remains enormous denial over the fact that the central cause of the war was our national disagreement about race and slavery, not states’ rights or anything else.

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